Computer virtualization deployments provide improvements for modern communication and data networks in terms of computational efficiency, cost, and speed. For instance, a variety of data centers may provide cloud-based networking services to a variety of different end users or tenants. Specifically, virtualized network environments are advantageous in implementing multi-tenancy by consolidating and sharing computational resources amongst different tenants. Multi-tenancy generally refers to a plurality of computing tenants, such as virtual machines (VMs) that share a physical host, server, and/or other types of physical computing nodes that comprise computing resources. Virtualized network environments are also able to provide a variety of new applications and/or services to the end users. For example, deployments where single computing applications are packaged into special purpose virtual computing nodes (e.g., containers and VMs) are gaining widespread acceptance with the maturing of Docker® and other similar virtualization technologies.
As virtualized network environments continue to become common place, computing security threats, such as computer malware, viruses, worms, and Trojans, are becoming a growing concern plaguing today's network systems. Computing security threats are typically designed to perform a variety of intrusive functions that include, but are not limited to disrupting computer operations, gathering personal and confidential information, and/or gaining access to private computing and network systems. To perform these intrusive functions, the computing security threats are generally encoded to exploit vulnerabilities and/or security lapses within the software (e.g., operating systems and web browsers) of a computing system. For example, malware based on return-oriented programming (ROP), may utilize a buffer overrun vulnerability to execute the malware instructions. Unfortunately, as today's network-based technologies (e.g., the Internet and the cloud) continue to gain in popularity, the proliferation of malware and other computing security threats continue to flourish.
To protect today's information systems, computing systems are often equipped with a variety of security computing applications, such as anti-malware that attempt to provide countermeasures from computing security threats. For example, anti-malware applications are able to reduce vulnerability and harm from malware attacks by providing real-time preventive protection and/or removal of potential malware code. Additionally, other computing applications may implement a trusted computing environment that measures computing code, computing processes, and/or VMs before execution to ensure their genuineness. However, as malware and other computing security threats become more sophisticated, existing computing safeguards may be unable to protect against the wide variety of threats that include, but are not limited to bugs, Trojan horses, time bombs, stack smashing, and ROP. For instance, security breaches of protected electronic information continue to persist for computing systems used in information sensitive sectors, such as the financial industry, government entities, and large corporations. As such, constantly improving the technology of detecting and processing of incoming computing security threats remains valuable in providing computing defenses against evolving and unknown computing security threats.